Who needs Trending anyway?

You know it: Trending sucks. At least it did when I last time checked – which has been a while, but I'm pretty sure it's still raped by bidbots, or more accurately, by the humans who use them.

People say that it's impossible to gain traction without bidbots. Now, this might sound legit, because "that's the only way to get views and gain traction." Except that that claim is a big handful of bullshit which would see much better use as a fertilizer for your soon-to-be bread. You can and probably will gain views if you engage with people, it takes time, sure, but ain't there such a thing as "buy-instant relationships". Not yet at least (and even if there were, the quality and authenticity of those I would argue to be questionable).

Now, the reason why bidbots gain views, is because of the way how Steemit.com (and some other UIs) is designed to deliver the content: the value of the post has a big impact. But like we know, when there's bidbots around, the idea of money=quality, is simply not true. It wasn't true to begin with, because relationships greatly affect the people you vote, but when you can "pay to quality", it is especially broken.

But the great thing is that Steem being decentralized, anyone can make a new interface that has its unique way of filtering content. @steeveapp has a platform – Steeve – that uses AI-algorithms to sort content, which is quite neat, and I could see something like AI becoming useful in the future when there's going to much more content, but for the time being it is still far from a ready UI.

While we are waiting for the robots to take over though, we are relying on a manual curation guilds: @curie, @c-squared, @ocd and many others for their own niches. And what I found recently, was that Steempeak (the interface I use mostly) has an 'Explore' tab where you can find several curation accounts' history.

The cool thing is that you can also search topics (tags) and favorite them.

The same you can also do with users. Though there's not many options to customize the favorites, and they can be viewed only one at a time.

People have been crying about the poor exploration possibilities of Steemit. Well, quit using it; I think Steempeak has the most advanced features for finding (quality) content.

Not only that, you can schedule posts, manage drafts (so far not a single draft has gone lost) and you can create templates (I always use this because of my signature, really useful if you have stuff you paste at the end of every post).

Then you have bunch of tools where you can see voting and earning stats and even vote witnesses directly from the interface. The only thing I couldn't find from the UI was the market (the 'Market' only displays price histories). But if they manage to integrate market, there's literally no reason for me to use Steemit.com at all.

Btw, Keychain is supported if you're afraid to use Steemconnect. It caused some errors in the beginning but is now working fine.

I think Steempeak is way too good to be down at 40 in the State of the DApps.